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On dreams cover

On dreams

Chapter 15: XIII.
By Sigmund Freud
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Psychiatry/Psychology

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The essay contrasts popular and scientific approaches to dreaming and argues that dreams are meaningful expressions of unconscious mental life. It explains how wishes, often repressed, are transformed by a dream-work into manifest content through mechanisms such as condensation, displacement, dramatization, and symbolization, and examines censorship that disguises latent desires to preserve sleep. The piece analyzes sample dreams, outlines classes of dreams, relates dreaming to repression and other unconscious processes, and explores how dream symbolism connects with myth, folklore, and pathological mental phenomena.

XIII.

I disclaim all pretension to have thrown light here upon all the problems of the dream, or to have dealt convincingly with everything here touched upon. If anyone is interested in the whole of dream literature, I refer him to the works of Sante de Sanctis (I sogni, Turin, 1899). For a more complete investigation of my conception of the dream, my work should be consulted: “Die Traumdeutung,” Leipzig and Vienna, third edition, 1911.[5] I will only point out in what direction my exposition on dream work should be followed up.

5. Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams,” third edition, translated by A. A. Brill. London: George Allen and Company, Ltd.

If I posit as the problem of dream interpretation the replacement of the dream by its latent ideas—that is, the resolution of that which the dream work has woven—I raise a series of new psychological problems which refer to the mechanism of this dream work as well as to the nature and the conditions of this so-called repression. On the other hand, I claim the existence of dream thoughts as a very valuable foundation for psychical construction of the highest order, provided with all the signs of normal intellectual performance. This matter is, however, removed from consciousness until it is rendered in the distorted form of the dream content. I am compelled to believe that all persons have such ideas, since nearly all, even the most normal, can have dreams. To the unconsciousness of dream ideas, or their relationship to consciousness and to repression, are linked questions of the greatest psychological importance. Their solution must be postponed until the analysis of the origin of other psychopathic growths, such as the symptoms of hysteria and of obsessions, has been made clear.